In kindergarten I wrote stories using the twenty or so words they had taught us, getting Mom to spell the rest. One of those words was "Gulf," as in the gas stations, so every story included a stop for gas. At a Gulf station. I was five, and already understood the value of product placement. I have been creating things ever since—stories, code, books, websites—and the tools I use to make them have changed so completely that the five-year-old with his workbook and the seventy-five-year-old with his AI would not recognize each other's instruments.

The Old Gates Are Closing

For most of my life, creativity came with a tollbooth. If you wanted to make a film, you needed a studio. If you wanted to publish a novel, you needed a New York editor to say yes. If you wanted your music heard, you needed a record label. If you wanted your photographs seen, you needed a gallery or a magazine. The tools themselves were expensive—cameras, darkrooms, mixing boards, typesetting equipment—and the distribution channels were controlled by people whose primary talent was saying "no."

That world is not dying. It is dead. The last generation of gatekeepers is still standing in front of doors that no longer lead anywhere, checking credentials for a building that has been demolished. Traditional publishers are merging into fewer and fewer imprints, paying smaller and smaller advances, and demanding that authors do their own marketing anyway. Record labels sign artists who already have millions of followers—which is to say, artists who have already proven they do not need a record label. Film studios greenlight sequels and reboots because original stories are "risky," which is another way of saying the executives have forgotten what stories are for.

None of this is a tragedy. It is an evacuation. The creative energy has not disappeared; it has moved.

The New Tools

Consider what a person with a story to tell can do today that was flatly impossible twenty years ago, and unimaginable forty years ago.

You can shoot a feature-length film on a phone that fits in your pocket. Not a home movie—a film, with better resolution than anything Kubrick ever had access to. You can edit it on a laptop using software that would have cost tens of thousands of dollars a decade ago and is now free. You can add a musical score composed by an AI that has studied every genre from baroque to rap, and if you do not like what it produces, you can ask it to try again in the time it takes to pour a cup of coffee. (You can also provide your own original melody, and the AI will write an arrangement around it.)

You can write a novel with an AI amanuensis that handles the mechanical labor of producing polished prose from your notes and outlines, the way I described in my essay on the skills of an author. The ideas, the characters, the plot—those are still yours. But the typing? The AI types beautifully, tirelessly, and without judgment.

You can generate illustrations, book covers, concept art, and architectural renderings by describing what you want in plain English. You do not need to know how to draw. You need to know what you want—which, it turns out, is the harder skill and always has been.

You can compose music without playing an instrument. You can clone your own voice, or create a new one, for a podcast or an audiobook. You can build a website—I am doing exactly that, right now—with tools that understand your intentions well enough to write the code while you focus on the content.

Every one of these capabilities would have seemed like science fiction when I was sitting in that kindergarten classroom, making up stories about Gulf stations. Every one of them is available today, most of them for free or close to it.

The New Markets

Tools are only half the revolution. The other half is where the audience went.

The audience left. It left the bookstores, the movie theaters, the record shops, the galleries. It did not stop consuming—it started consuming differently, in places the old gatekeepers do not control and, in many cases, do not even understand.

A novelist today can publish on Amazon and reach more readers in a week than most traditionally published books reach in a year. A musician can release an album on Spotify or Bandcamp without anyone's permission. A filmmaker can premiere on YouTube and build an audience of millions—remember "Where The Bears Are," the gay comedy series shot on a zero-budget phone? The creators turned a handheld camera into a studio, built a loyal following, and sold DVDs on the side. No studio, no gatekeeper, just a Wi-Fi connection and a story worth telling.

Writers are building careers on Substack, where readers pay directly for essays and serialized fiction. Artists are selling prints, commissions, and tutorials on Patreon. Photographers are licensing their work through stock platforms that did not exist fifteen years ago. Podcasters are reaching niche audiences that no radio station would ever have served, because radio stations needed mass appeal and podcasts do not.

The common thread is this: the middleman is optional. The relationship between creator and audience has become direct, personal, and sustainable in ways that the old system never permitted and never wanted to permit, because the old system's entire business model depended on standing between the two and taking a cut.

What the Skeptics Get Wrong

The objection I hear most often is that AI will make creativity worthless. If anyone can generate a novel or a painting or a symphony in seconds, why would anyone pay for one?

This gets the economics exactly backward. When production costs drop, more people create, not fewer. When more people create, the audience grows, because creators are also consumers. And when the audience grows, the demand for work that is genuinely good—work that has something real behind it, something felt and lived and earned—does not decrease. It increases, because the ocean of mediocre generated content makes the real thing stand out like a lighthouse.

AI can imitate. It can predict the next word or the next pixel based on trillions of examples. What it cannot do is experience. It has never sat in a waiting room dreading a diagnosis. It has never watched a sunset over the Gulf of Mexico and felt the particular ache of beauty that is also loss. It has never been five years old, writing a story in a workbook, not because anyone asked it to but because the story was in there and had to come out.

The human element is not a quaint leftover from the pre-digital age. It is the product. Everything else is packaging.

Useless Skills

It's been a few years since most elementary schools have given up teaching cursive handwriting, and I still see memes on Facebook bemoaning its loss and/or demanding its return. My response always is, "Why stop there? Let's bring back cuneiform, too!" And why not? It would be exactly as useful as cursive, which is to say, not at all.

I get the ache of knowing something there's no longer any use for. C'mon, I can develop black and white and even color film in a home darkroom. I can write a tiny operating system in assembly language. I can spell thousands of words correctly. None of those things retains any practical value in today's world, nor will they in the future.

When I was a kid, grandparents were a source of knowledge. They knew history, and skills, and stories. And everything they knew and shared, was potentially applicable to me and my life. I don't feel that I have anything useful to offer my grandkids in the way of life skills. After all, my eldest grandson introduced me to AI!

My point is, the new tools do not diminish creativity; they transform it. And resenting no longer needing old skills is basically just a variant of "Get off my lawn!" It's a sign of a stiffening brain, resistant to change, unwilling to learn the new skills that are the keys to future creativity.

Creativity at Seventy-Five

I am typing this at seventy-five. My knees hurt, my eyes are not what they were, and I cannot remember where I put my cellphone while I am holding it. But I have more creative tools at my disposal than at any previous point in my life, and more ways to reach an audience than I could have imagined at any previous age.

I am writing a novel with an AI that handles the prose (trained on my own writing) while I handle everything else. I am maintaining a website that I built years ago in the old-fashioned way, but AI has allowed me to add features and content with an AI coding partner. I am writing essays—this one, for instance—using tools that let me focus on what I want to say rather than wrestling with formatting and markup. My photographs get processed through software I helped design. My ideas go from brain to page to published faster than ever before.

None of this replaces the hard part. The hard part has always been having something worth saying. No tool, no matter how sophisticated, can give you that. It comes from living, from paying attention, from accumulating seventy-five years of sitting in diners and airports and hospital waiting rooms, watching people and wondering what their story is.

The old tools are fading. The old markets are gone. And I have never been more creatively alive. If that is not something to be grateful for, I do not know what is.